This is a digital archive of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing
press (c. 1450) to the Berne Convention (1886) and beyond. The UK
Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) funded the initial phase (completed in 2008) focusing on key materials from
Renaissance Italy (Venice, Rome), France, the German speaking countries, Britain and the United
States.

We continue to add new materials. Primary sources from Spain were published in 2012, and the Netherlands followed in 2015. Jewish law sources, edited by Neil Netanel, were published in 2016.
In 2018, Elena Cooper joined Ronan Deazley as co-editor of the British Sources, adding further documents illustrating distinct aspects of the history of copyright concerning the visual arts in the late nineteenth century (in the main, 1869-1900).

For each of the geographical zones/jurisdictions, national editors take responsibility for selecting, sourcing, transcribing, translating and commenting documents. These include privileges, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts and materials relating to legislative history, but also contemporary letters, essays, treatises and artefacts.

The national editors’ initial brief was to limit the selection to 50 core documents for Britain, Germany, France, and to 20 core documents for Italy and the US (these covering only a shorter period). For the subsequent additions of Spain and The Netherlands, again a limit of 50 core documents was set. The methodological approach is explained here. Some editors have sourced many more contextual documents which are fully catalogued, and linked to the core materials. Document selection has been scrutinised by an
international advisory board.

Detailed information about our methodological approach may be found in the
FAQ section.
In 2010, Cambridge based publisher OpenBook published a companion volume to the digital
archive:
"Privilege and Property, Essays on the History of Copyright",
containing an
introductory essay by the editors: The History of Copyright History.

The original database design and website were coded by Karin Hoehne (Cologne, Germany).
Redesigns were implemented in 2012 and in 2015. The functionality now provides an
OAI/PMH data interface delivering record data as Dublin Core. Please refer to the
FAQ
section for information about accessing the interface.

Professor Lionel Bently, University of Cambridge
Professor Martin Kretschmer, CREATe, University of Glasgow

General Editors, Primary Sources on Copyright

The website should be compatible with any modern internet browser since we follow
standard HTML conventions without usage of HTML5. We might switch to HTML5 integration
in the future. Updating older browsers is recommended.

Copyright statement

You may copy and distribute the translations and commentaries in this resource, or parts of such translations and commentaries, in any medium, for non-commercial purposes as long as the authorship of the commentaries and translations is acknowledged, and you indicate the source as Bently & Kretschmer (eds), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) (www.copyrighthistory.org).

You may not publish these documents for any commercial purposes, including charging a fee for providing access to these documents via a network. This licence does not affect your statutory rights of fair dealing.

Although the original documents in this database are in the public domain, we are unable to grant you the right to reproduce or duplicate some of these documents in so far as the images or scans are protected by copyright or we have only been able to reproduce them here by giving contractual undertakings. For the status of any particular images, please consult the information relating to copyright in the bibliographic records.